Google Knowledge Graph — Going Beyond Semantics Part 1

Before I start dis­cuss­ing the Google Know­ledge Graph (i.e. Google’s latest gift to ‘search-kind’) let’s get back into our own hard­wir­ing and dis­cover ourselves a bit. Here’s a ques­tion for you:

Have you ever thought how you think?

Have you ever thought what goes on in your mind’s eye, when you’re look­ing for inform­a­tion bur­ied deep inside your memory? Well, the puzzle about the inner work­ings of our brain has fas­cin­ated many for cen­tur­ies — and me: what makes a per­son do one thing over another, why did they use that as a search term… etc etc. But a com­mon obser­va­tion which occurs in almost every research is that we ‘con­nect con­cepts’.

This means that we need to relate stuff we’re look­ing for, to the things we already know/remember about… things that we dis­cretely quantify with fea­tures or traits.

In simple words, our brain starts search­ing along a con­nec­tion going out from what we know. This con­nec­tion leads into the wide expanse of our memory and links to some­thing closely related, which fur­ther links to another concept that adds mean­ing to our recol­lec­tion pro­cess. In the end, we may find the exact answer or memory we wanted from our head.

(FYI, this is also how web min­ing and data min­ing work on a very sub­lim­inal level)

Then, we estab­lish a fresh dir­ect con­nec­tion between the new item and what we star­ted out with. This is a con­crete rela­tion. It can be used the next time we exploit our neur­ons to look for new things from our memory dump. The con­nec­tion is called a ‘myelin con­nec­tion’. Infact, there’s an excel­lent book out there that explains the facts

Google’s Know­ledge Graph is a very sim­ilar. Call it a co-incidence, but if you under­stand all the basic func­tions described above, then you will eas­ily under­stand the fol­low­ing and apply it so it not only bene­fits your site con­tent and but also the vis­it­ors to your.

This latest update encap­su­lates all of Google’s attempts to curb copied con­tent, changes to the spammed index, changes made to Google’s pri­vacy policy, per­son­al­ised search res­ults and the increased imple­ment­a­tion of LSI…all rolled into one easy explanation.

If you want more back­ground info relat­ing to this here’s some addi­tional ‘bed­time reading’:

The end goal is view for everyone

Google has been aim­ing at an end goal — mak­ing their index come ‘alive’. And they’re doing this by relat­ing a user’s quer­ies to real-world entities!

The know­ledge graph aims to sim­plify the search­ers’ quest for answers by help­ing them dis­cover needed inform­a­tion in an easy and fast way. It maps dif­fer­ent things or con­cepts like dates, ages, appear­ance and just about any tan­gible attrib­ute onto a graph. This graph would exist in the index, relat­ing all pages and the data within those pages to each other.

That’s why the Google Know­ledge Graph is the next evol­u­tion of semantic index­ing, so to speak. Or oth­er­wise, an advanced applic­a­tion of the same. Because no two things can be placed in rela­tion on a graph without that rela­tion hav­ing rel­ev­ance to a mean­ing­ful query. And deci­pher­ing such quer­ies to deduce the aim of the searcher is the prime focus of using LSI. (NOTE: Worth hav­ing a read of Lifehacker’s art­icle on how smarter search res­ults with semantics)

This new innov­a­tion from Google is sure to revolu­tion­ise search in ways we may never have dreamt about. And those most affected are going to be site own­ers and online busi­nesses, right next to search­ers and the vis­it­ing traffic. But this time, it’s going to have a very pos­it­ive impact if you ride along.

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